Government Healthcare Policy, Business and Technology

The FDA's revolving door raises ethical questions

Modern Healthcare (complimentary online subscription): Dr. Vinay Prasad had long heard the anecdotes: An employee leaves the Food and Drug Administration, then resurfaces in a lucrative position at a drug company. How often did this happen? he wondered. Without hard evidence, he could only speculate.

So Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and an assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, teamed up with Dr. Jeffrey Bien, an internal medicine resident there, to find out. They examined the post-FDA career paths of 55 hematology-oncology medical reviewers who approved and rejected drugs for the FDA from 2001 to 2010, discovering that 15 subsequently worked for or consulted to the biopharmaceutical industry.

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